HP this week introduced its new family of Chromebooks designed for students and teachers. The laptops use low-power SoCs from AMD and Intel to ensure a long battery life, they are rugged enough to survive classes and their feature set is tailored for the specifics of educational environments.

As their names suggest, the notebooks feature a 11.6-inch and 14-inch display with or without touch and/or stylus support. Most of the models will have a 1366×768 resolution, but there will be 14-inch SKUs with a 1920×1080 resolution.

All the 2020 Education Edition Chromebooks machines from HP are built to withstand drops on wood and concrete, they feature a spill-resistant keyboard, and support modern connectivity, such as Wi-Fi 5, USB Type-C, and microSD. In order to ensure that all modern programs for education can run fast enough even when used simultaneously, the systems come equipped with 8 GB of RAM, but their local storage is limited to an eMMC 5.1 drive with capacities ranging from 16 GB to 128 GB. Meanwhile, like all Chromebooks, these are feature Google’s H1 security chip.

HP’s 2020 Education Edition Chromebooks are equipped with a 47.36 Wh battery that provides from 10 to 13.5 hours of battery life, according to the manufacturer. As for portability, the laptops feature a 1.83 cm – 2.09 cm z-height and weight from 1.32 kilograms to 1.54 kilograms. Considering the fact that these Chromebooks will be used primarily in classes and are not supposed to be carried around for a long time, they seem compact and light enough.

Post Your Comment

13 Comments

I would be intereseted in these but my experience with HP so far on parts replacements and availability has been less than stellar. Ruggid is great but kids destroy the keyboards on these things and often the screens too. At least 3x a semester somebody will forget a pen at the top of the keyboard and close the screen cracking it, and there is always one little brat who thinks it will be funny to re arrange the keyboard and they break it in the process. I am looking at 6 of them just to my left that have been busted this way this year.Reply

I've also been unimpressed by the design of a few generations of HP Chromebooks now in terms of durability and repairability. With ridiculous degrees of part replacement required for relatively small areas of damage. I wouldn't really say they are fit for purpose.Reply

One thing that I have not figure out, why are not Chromebooks using Qualcomm instead of Windows. It just seams a better fit and only thing I can think of it deficiency in OS. For me personally, I would never consider either a Chromebook or Windows for ARM ( Qualcomm ) laptop but I would serious consider a Qualcomm based Chromebook for some light. Reply

ARM based chromebooks exist but they were either horribly under powered or way too expensive. For the price point the cheap Intel Celerons are pretty bang on. These are education targeted devices so I would expect them to be coming in under $350 USD each for the base config.Reply

1366×768 resolution needs to just die already (as do all of the 16:9 resolutions). Especially in a <15" screen size. 16:10 or 3:2 or even 4:3. The lack of vertical space in these small devices is a pain!

1920x1080 really should be the minimum resolution, regardless of screen size. 1920x1200 would be better.Reply

They don’t care, schools are limited on bandwidth, have 200+ students streaming YouTube at 1080p+ and my phone would be ringing constantly that the internet is down or slow. At the lower resolutions doing up word documents research websites or anything else just works. Not to mention these things need a bare minimum of an 8h battery life and the lower resolutions help that a lot. These things are designed to come in under $350 USD and there are a lot of corners you have to cut to offer a stable product and still hit that price point. These are about on par spec wise as the Dell and Asus chromebooks that we order in bulk.Reply

I'd wager the 768p screen is more for product differentiation (i.e. avoid cannibalizing their mid end products). We've had 1080p for years now, and the cost differential between 1080p and 768p is probably dollars at most. But if they started putting actually good screens into low end laptops then nobody would buy their mid end laptopsReply